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Good Night, and Good Luck (2005)

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From Time Out London

I’m still to be convinced by one recent newspaper’s breathless assertion that we’re living in a golden age of Hollywood – a few ‘serious’ prestige movies don’t add up to a glittering new movement – but there are certainly some promising vital signs, and George Clooney’s second film as a director is one of them. In fact, such is the extent of the soapbox that Clooney’s recently been given – on the back of both this film and Stephen Gaghan’s oil industry conspiracy-drama ‘Syriana’ – that the actor-director now appears to be the nearest thing that America has to an opposition. Should we laugh or cry?

Fittingly, it’s the current absence of critical voices in the media with which Clooney grapples here, even if only by reflection on some very specific events of half a century ago. This taut, simple, neatly framed and superbly performed black-and-white drama – steeped in cigarette smoke and jazz – takes us back to the CBS news channel in the mid-’50s and, in particular, the work of one broadcast journalist, Ed Murrow, and his weekly news show, ‘See It Now’. Like ‘All The President’s Men’, this is a film that tells of a well-known period in American history purely from the point of view of crusading journalists.

The focus is tight, but the allusions are many. It’s Murrow (an excellent David Strathairn) and his team’s daring investigations of Senator Joe McCarthy’s dubious committee investigations into suspected communists that offer Clooney the chance to make numerous veiled parallels with America’s current waging of its War on Terror. Everything’s implicit, of course, but the parallels are obvious.

It’s both fitting and slightly frustrating that Clooney should take such a cloak-and-dagger approach to commenting on politics now. His story is of course one of a time of paranoia – fear of exposure, fear of getting the story wrong, fear of losing one’s job, and Clooney captures this mood very well. Well-placed silences offer the cinematic equivalent of the expectant deep breath before a plan succeeds or disastrously fails. The film contains not a single exterior shot. It’s a claustrophobic affair, and the newsroom takes on the atmosphere of a war council. But there’s a niggling feeling that what the film has to say about America today is only suggestive and quite unqualified. It flatters the opinion of the liberal-minded but offers little to the merely curious.

Still, where the film most succeeds is in its treatment of conscience. While Clooney shows a real fondness for the shared experience and bonhomie (and period trappings) of a campaigning newsroom, the sense of comradeship between Murrow and his colleagues (played by Clooney, Robert Downey Jr and others) is offset by a very real sense that each man is alone and even, perhaps, in danger, whether professionally or personally. When the excited chatter dies down, everyone is left with only their own personal decisions to make: whether to stay or go. It’s a mood best illustrated by a single shot of Murrow, alone, tapping at a typewriter as Clooney’s camera pulls back to reveal an empty office around him.

This is historical reconstruction of the highest order, and Clooney skilfully handles both archive footage and verbatim dialogue from the original ‘See It Now’ shows. It’s a modest but powerful affair, and a fantastic mood piece.

Author: Dave Calhoun

Time Out London Issue 1852: February 15-22 2006

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